Love and Death in Kathmandu by Amy Willesee

Author:Amy Willesee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466872325
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter 18

The Hindu World’s Most Eligible Bachelor

When Dipendra turned up for officer training at the Kathmandu military academy, he had already spent much of his life around soldiers. There was little his instructors could teach him; he knew tactics, weapons and drill. He wasn’t the best in terms of physical condition, but in all other areas he was top of his class. Especially on the rifle range.

Dipendra didn’t have to do military training. His father became head of the army without ever learning anything more than how to salute and inspect troops. But again, King Birendra wanted his son to experience the real world.

The crown prince got yelled at like everyone else, recalled one of his instructors, Ananta Simha. He mixed easily with the other recruits, but he could never be their equal. He was already colonel-in-chief of the army, and as such didn’t have to sleep in a room with two or three others like the rest of the cadets. He got his own quarters, while his new personal ADC, Raju Karki, slept in an adjoining room.

As a public-relations exercise, Dipendra’s spell in the army worked a treat, and he would remain immensely popular with the military. But he only did six months of the eighteen-month course before he was pulled out to begin a university degree in geography.

Tribhuvan University had been a hotbed of anti-monarchy sentiment in the democracy movement of less than a year earlier, so it wasn’t an option for him to attend classes there. Again, his old tutor Dr Bal Kumar K.C. was called upon. Dr K.C. organised other professors to go to the palace to teach various subjects required in a bachelor’s degree, such as English and Nepali, while he handled the geography.

Each day the academic would be picked up by a royal car and driven in his formal Nepalese clothes to the palace. It had been strange for him in the beginning. He saw himself as a ‘basic man who came from the mountains and walked on the street’. But he got used to the palace. He accepted the woefully inadequate remuneration as an honour. At first he’d even tried to give the money back. One thousand rupees for five months work was hardly worth collecting, but he was told that it had already been allocated so if he didn’t take it, some palace bureaucrat would.

When it came time to give Princess Shruti and Prince Nirajan extra tutoring, Dr K.C.’s name came up, but Dipendra made sure to scuttle that. He told his siblings that the doctor taught such complex things they’d never understand him. The real reason, however, was status: he wanted the best geographer in the country as his own personal tutor. It gave him a psychological edge.

There was a little truth to his excuse. When the doctor had been tutoring Dipendra in preparation for Eton, he taught material from the master’s curriculum, years ahead of the academic level required. Dipendra had seemed to soak it up and never said he didn’t understand anything.

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